42 THE ORDER OP BIMANA. 



quite separate from the other toes, when the foot is not de- 

 formed by boots or shoes :* therefore, nothing more can be said 

 in favour of an Order of Bimana, or a human kingdom. 



We must return to the subdivision proposed by Charles 

 Bonaparte, & family. Man constitutes a simple family in the 

 Order of Quadrumana, distinguished by characteristics pre- 

 cisely equal in importance to those which make a difference 

 between other similar groups in the class of mammalia, that 

 which even comes to the assistance of the adversaries of the 

 human kingdom, and the partisans of the zoological system. 

 For want of positive characteristics taken from the extremities, 

 which could never, in the eyes of true naturalists, as we have 

 just said, favour a serious distinction between man and other 

 quadrumana, a characteristic in dentition has been discovered, 

 remarkable for its constancy even in the most degraded and 

 animal-like races, and which, first and foremost, distinguishes 

 man from the group which immediately follows him in the 

 zoological series. This characteristic, upon which Professor 

 Owen has, in many places, insisted, like the two Cuviers, 

 but with an entirely new vigour, f is the contiguity of the 

 teeth and the continuity of their crowns, not one of which ever 

 extends beyond the level of the others. J 



Thus it is for man, like the rest of the mammalia ; it is the 

 dental system which gives us the best characteristic. A new 

 proof that the study of mankind and that of animals ought to 

 be conducted in one and the same manner ; a proof, indeed, 

 that these two studies are two parallel branches, intimately 

 united, of one and the same science. 



* Comptes Rendus de I'Acadt'mie des Sciences, vol. ii. See, also, for the 

 separation of the great toe, the photographs in the Voyage a la Cote Orientale 

 d'Afrique, by Captain Guillain. 



f Odontography, London, 1840, p. 452. Catalogue of the Hunterian Collec- 

 tion, " Osteology," vol. ii, p. 800. 



X [A character which, as the Cuviers and Owen have pointed out, man 

 shares with the fossil Anoplotherium and its allies, from the Paris gypsum. 

 EDITOR.] 



